Picture a parasite. The animal you picture probably isn’t the same as what someone else does, it probably fits E.O. Wilson’s description: “predators that eat prey in units of less than one”. But the hoverfly Microdon mutabilis is a different kind of parasite. Adult flies linger close to ant colonies, and their larvae feed on … Continued
Love them or fear them, snakes fascinate people. Given their popularity, you’d think a class working on snake biodiversity would find few opportunities to create new species articles. So I was surprised when student editors in Andrew Durso’s Snake Biodiversity class at Florida Gulf Coast University created eight new articles about snake species as part … Continued
What’s the connection between explosives, major depressive disorder, and chest pain? I wouldn’t have known until I reviewed some student work from last semester. If you’ve taken an advanced cell biology class, you may have heard of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cyclic AMP), a molecule that’s related to ATP (the “energy currency” that mitochondria turn sugars … Continued
Before the release of The Last of Us, most people had probably never heard of the fungus Cordyceps. In the tv show and the video game, Cordyceps takes control of people, turning them into zombies that spread the infection. In the real world, Cordyceps doesn’t infect humans, but it does infect ants, taking control of … Continued
When University of New Mexico senior Tessa Hernandez was tasked with a Wikipedia assignment last semester in her Volcanology course, her search for an article to improve led her to discover the stratovolcano article, where she identified critical missing information. As an Earth and Planetary Sciences major, Tessa used her existing knowledge of the field … Continued
Browsing Wikipedia in early 2024, you might have stumbled upon an article about Lake Moeris and encountered this opening paragraph. Chances are if you had, you’d have kept browsing. (If it had been me, I’d have clicked on endorheic, to discover what that word means.) Lake Moeris (Ancient Greek: Μοῖρις, genitive Μοίριδος) is an ancient … Continued
There’s far more to figs than the filling in your Fig Newtons. Beyond the domestic fig, there are hundreds of wild species, from banyans, to strangler figs, to the creeping fig that’s used as an alternative to ivy in warmer climates. And in tropical forests, figs are keystone species. Most trees produce their fruit in … Continued
Africa is the birthplace of our species, and the place human civilization began, but outside of Egypt and the Nile Valley, how much do you know about ancient archaeological sites anywhere on the African continent? Over the past decade, Kate Grillo’s classes have worked to fix that problem, at least on Wikipedia. Initially at the … Continued
Wikipedia assignments come in all shapes and sizes, but some of the most interesting are from classes that have found an open lane and return to it year after year. Directing your students to the same topic area term after term allows them to build upon the work of your previous classes. That can have … Continued
